Customer service representatives are often responsible for a wide variety of tasks. In addition to being proficient in accomplishing particular tasks like updating addresses or other status changes, providing new or updated quotes, responding to billing inquiries, cancelling and renewing services, and entering data related to the customer, the customer service representative is expected to be more than cordial, pleasant, engaging and generally charming.
To support customer service representatives, each has a workstation. The customer service representative relies on their workstation to provide them with information quickly in order to maintain conversational flow with the customer. Despite tremendous computing power and the latest technology, delays are inevitably introduced by the support technology. Additional delays are also created by the customer service representative, whether it be the customer service representative's natural speech cadence, thought process, deliberation over a selection, or simple consideration of what to say or type next.
When dealing with financial products and services, further delay is also introduced because the customer service representative must authenticate the customer. It is often important to conduct advanced authentication to prevent fraud and theft. In addition to taking the necessary information to identify the customer, commonly a series of predetermined questions is used to affirmatively authenticate the customer. Even asking fairly simple questions such as one's social security number or mother's maiden name, introduces significant delay and impedes the customer service representatives ability to quickly and efficiently assist the customer. Efficiency is very important to establishing the desired rapport.
Still further, customer service representatives are expected to mine the customer database for opportunities to make new and additional sales of products and services, often referred to as “upselling.” Upselling is critical because it expands revenue with a targeted group, which is predisposed to using the company for goods and services (e.g., existing customers or potential customers who have already reached out to the company).
It is understandable that with all that a customer service representative is expected to juggle, that presenting a warm, confident, informed face to the customer is challenging. Yet, this is exactly what is expected. Thus, a need exists to provide support to the customer service representatives to allow them to represent the company as well as possible.
In response to these challenges, several approaches have been developed to improve customer service. U.S. Pat. No. 8,588,395, issued on Nov. 19, 2013, collects data from a plurality of calls to generate reports. Upon review of the reports, alerts are generated to identify poorly performing units. Other attempts at improvement look to remove, or at least minimize, the role of the customer service representative herself. For example, U.S. PG Pub. No. 2012/0076283, published on Mar. 29, 2012, creates a smart chat room in which customers can be directed to an appropriate Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) or particular display that may assist the customer without interaction with a customer service representative.
Further, U.S. Pat. No. 6,601,762, issued on Aug. 5, 2003, creates a point-of-sale (POS) voice authentication transaction system. The POS system, however, must have a pre-recorded voice message from the customer for comparison to the live speech. This is very similar to the security questions noted above in that the customer must complete a preliminary set up in order for the system to work. Additionally, during authentication, the customer must be asked to repeat the pre-recorded message and then repeat it, which interrupts the customer interaction flow. U.S. Pat. No. 8,483,365, issued on Jul. 9, 2013, similarly tediously requires multiple repetitions of voiced phrases. Still other attempts utilize a central authority that register customers and provides authentication certificates, which must then be passed from the customer to the provider of goods and services (see U.S. PG Pub. No. 2008/0181379 published on Jul. 31, 2008).
Referral from one customer service representative to another for specialized services is often desirable. In such a case, traditional call centers have no ability to facilitate hand-off between customer service representatives beyond placing the customer on hold while the first representative tries to fill in the second representative. This not only yields often poor and inconsistent results, but creates dissatisfaction among the customers on hold and after reconnection when details and information already presented must be discussed again.
In view of the above, there is an unmet need to provide companies, such as insurance companies, the ability to streamline interactions with their customers even when performing advanced authentication of the customer is helpful to establishing rapport. The authentication remains valid or is re-performed as necessary when more than one customer service representative speak with a customer during a single or multiple calls.